Liberated Arabic Handwritten Text Recognition using Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks

Arabic script is exhibited in a cursive style, which is a departure from the norm in many common languages, and the shapes of letters are contingent on their positions within words. The form of the first letter is influenced by the subsequent letter, middle letters are shaped by both preceding and succeeding letters, and the shape of the final letter is determined by the preceding letter. Additionally, certain letters are found to have strikingly similar shapes, making Arabic text recognition a formidable challenge in computer vision. The challenge of detecting and recognizing Arabic handwritten text is addressed in this paper by proposing a novel system that integrates two Deep Learning models without the constraints of a predefined dictionary or language model. Object Detection techniques are employed in the first model to accurately identify lines, words, and punctuation marks, providing a robust foundation for text recognition. In the second model, a powerful recognition system is developed, trained on the IFN/ENIT dataset to predict character sequences from handwritten text images. The architecture is comprised of a convolutional neural network (CNN) with residual connections, followed by a Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) layer, and culminates in a fully connected layer. State-of-the-art results in unconstrained Arabic text recognition tasks are achieved by this approach.